


The Will to Power of the Weakest

by Philosopher_King



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angry Sex, Angst and Porn, Aromantic Loki, Asexual Loki, Complicated Relationships, Cunnilingus, Demisexual Loki, F/M, Hand Jobs, Hate Sex, Love/Hate, Nietzschean Loki, Other, Past Torture, Philosophical References, Prisoner Loki, Scars, Vaginal Fingering, Wall Sex, Weird Scar Fetish, loki is a little shit, or maybe demisexual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 00:15:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6063535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sif comes to visit Loki in Asgard's prisons to ask him to stop being cruel to Thor and become his brother once more, and the visit does not go as planned: old memories of feelings she used to have for Loki are called up, and she discovers something about him that she did not anticipate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Will to Power of the Weakest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [little_spider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_spider/gifts).



> This fic is dedicated to [little_spider](http://archiveofourown.org/users/little_spider/pseuds/little_spider), aka @fuckyeahrichardiii on Tumblr, who expressed a desire for Loki/Sif angry wall sex. You got what you asked for, and so, so much more...
> 
> Since all of my fics take place in the same timeline/universe thingy, this fic presupposes the events of my stories [Silver and Gold](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5047336/chapters/11606062) and [The Abyss Gazes Also](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5236796/chapters/12078722), but you don't need to have read them to understand what's going on. All the background events from the latter are self-explanatory (though you'll get more resonances if you've read it); and all you need to know from the former is that when Loki and Sif were teenagers, she had a crush on him, she tried unsuccessfully to kiss him, he explained that he wasn't into her because he's asexual and aromantic (though he didn't exactly put it that way, because they don't seem to have those concepts in Asgard), and he talked about Plato a lot and gave her a copy of Plato's complete works (yeah, that sounds weird, but I swear it makes sense in context). My version of Loki is really into Midgardian philosophy.
> 
> The quote referred to in the title, and later in the fic, is from Nietzsche, _On the Genealogy of Morality_ , Third Essay, section 14.

After his first few days in prison, Loki did not pay attention to the nightly changing of the guard. It was of little consequence to him: the guard was not changed until two hours after a servant came down to the dungeons with his evening meal, which one of the guards on duty passed through the enchanted barrier into his cell; and after that, it was two more hours before the glaring white lights in the cells were turned off, leaving only the faint glow from the wall sconces in the hallway outside, so that Loki was forced to stop reading or writing and attempt (with varying degrees of success) to go to sleep.

So on this evening, as usual, Loki remained sitting on his bed, his attention fixed on the page in front of him, when he heard the telltale footsteps that indicated that the two guards who took turns standing at attention at the door into the dungeons and pacing along the row of mostly empty cells were being replaced by two other guards who would do exactly the same thing. He remained intently focused on his book (a treatise on the biology of seiðr that his mother had been recommending to him for ages) even when he heard the footsteps approach his cell, then stop in front of one of the magical barriers. He figured one of the nighttime guards was a young man, new to prison duty, and was curious to see Asgard’s most famous (indeed, at the moment, its only) prisoner: the fallen second prince, the usurper, the failed conqueror.

Loki did not look up until he heard a familiar voice, female, say his name. Then he raised his head slowly, and turned to face her with a broad, slightly manic smile that did not touch his eyes. “Lady Sif,” he said silkily. “What grave transgression could have gotten an elite warrior like yourself relegated to prison guard duty?”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Sif said, her voice hard and cold.

“Come to gawk at the caged beast, then?” Loki asked, his smile widening so that it looked more like simply baring his teeth.

“You _know_ that’s not why I’m here, either,” Sif said sharply.

“Then I am at a loss. What could you _possibly_ want with a filthy traitor like me?”

“I’m here to tell you to stop being so cruel to Thor,” she said, her anger a coiled tension in her voice.

Loki raised his eyebrows. “At the moment I am doing nothing to Thor. I could be as kind and gentle as you like—I could fall to my knees and beg his forgiveness—if he ever came down here to visit. But alas, he does not.”

“That’s because he’s afraid of what he’ll find if he does come,” Sif replied. “He’s afraid you’ll still be the way you were on Midgard—the way you were when he returned from Midgard, the time before.”

“Before I fell to my death, you mean?” Loki asked sweetly, and relished watching Sif flinch.

“He misses his brother, Loki, the brother he once had; he wants his brother back.”

“But his brother is dead, I am afraid—or perhaps more accurately, never lived. I’m sorry to say I am all that is left.” He closed the book and spread his hands in a gesture of mock helplessness.

“And who, or what, is left?” Sif asked shortly.

“The monster from our childhood nightmares, my dear; the viper in the cradle.”

“Is that what you like to think?” Sif said, scorn and pity mingling in her voice.

“I’d rather believe that than a pile of pretty lies,” Loki spat.

“Thor is your brother and he loves you,” Sif said firmly. “That is not a lie.”

“Then he can come and tell me that himself,” Loki said coolly.

“If you can promise that when he comes he will find his brother and not some mad, bitter stranger, then he will.”

Loki gave her a cruel, knowing smile. “And why do you come to plead for him, Lady Sif? Do you hope to raise yourself in his estimation by bringing his wayward brother to heel?”

“I am perfectly confident in Thor’s esteem for me,” Sif said calmly.

Loki’s smile grew broader and crueler. “Ah, but it isn’t the _kind_ of esteem you want, is it?”

Sif’s nostrils flared. “I come as Thor’s friend, nothing more or less. Not everything is about sex—you of all people should know that.”

“‘I of all people’?” Loki laughed humorlessly. “I learned much during my exile, Lady Sif; and one thing I learned is that for most people, everything _is_ about sex. I simply happen not to be ‘most people.’”

“I did not come in the hope of making my way into Thor’s bed,” Sif reaffirmed, her jaw clenched.

“Perhaps you hoped to make your way into a different bed, then,” Loki drawled with a mocking smile, stretching himself out significantly on his own.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Sif snapped.

“It was you who flattered me first, you may recall.”

“I was a little girl. I gave up that desire long ago.”

“Perhaps you gave up too soon,” Loki purred, his smile taking on a predatory edge. He swung his legs down off the bed, stood with a cat-like grace, and stalked toward the barrier between them. “One of the many things I learned in exile was how to give pleasure to a woman. Or a man,” he added after a slight pause. “But that’s hardly relevant at the moment.”

Anger flashed in Sif’s eyes, and she strode heedlessly through the barrier into Loki’s cell. Loki backed up a few steps, making a show of alarm; but in truth he had been eagerly waiting for the moment when Sif grabbed his upper arm roughly with her left hand, pressed her right arm across his chest with her hand fisted against his shoulder, and charged through the cell to push him savagely against its back wall. She moved her right arm a little higher so that her metal-clad forearm exerted just enough pressure on his neck to make his quiet laughter sound slightly strangled.

“What game are you playing, Trickster?” she snarled.

“The great game,” he said. He still sounded strangled, and the breath he took to speak came out as a gasp, so Sif loosened her hold across his neck, though she did not release her grip on his arm. “The game you are always playing, all of you, with its mysterious unspoken rules, while I only watched from the sidelines.”

“And what could you possibly win by playing it?” Sif spat. “You who claimed that you were whole and self-sufficient, and would never need another to make you so.”

Loki grinned slyly. “No one likes to feel left out, now, do they, Sif?”

He was mocking her again. She pressed her forearm tighter across his neck and felt a cruel joy in hearing his choked gasp. The rage pounding through her veins, surging through her gut, felt strangely exhilarating. She wanted nothing more than to stop that mocking mouth; but that queer intoxicating rage (and perhaps, too, the wine she had drunk before she came—to _calm_ her nerves, she had hoped) insisted that only one way of doing that could satisfy her. She swung her arm away from Loki’s neck (narrowly missing striking him in the face with the steel of her vambrace) and surged forward, at once to slam her fist into the wall just beside his head and to press her lips against his.

The action called vividly back to her memory a moment centuries ago when she had done just this—under circumstances entirely different, of course, full of tender hope instead of this vicious rage—and for half a moment she feared that he would turn away again, humiliate her again. But no: his mouth opened in some kind of welcome; he let her tongue seek out his, her teeth catch his bottom lip, and he replied with his own teeth, his sharp canines nipping at her upper lip as his mouth seemed to curve into a sneer even through the kiss. There was nothing tender about this: their eyes stayed wide open, each burning a challenge into the other’s; this was just another kind of sparring, with lips and tongue and teeth as their weapons rather than staff or blade.

As the kiss grew deeper, fiercer, Sif’s hand slid down from the wall beside Loki’s head to claw down his shoulder, his back, his hip—she could feel how all his bones stood out too starkly—then she reached up past the edge of his tunic to clutch possessively at his cock through the leather of his trousers. She was hardly surprised to find it mostly soft, only barely starting to rise and stiffen, but she still pulled out of the kiss to smirk at him. He shrugged, unconcerned, and said, “You know I do not feel desire as most people do.”

Sif took this as a challenge, and with a wordless, feral smile, she lunged back in to kiss him again and slipped her hand past the waistband of his trousers. She grasped the end of his cock, pulled the foreskin back, ran a teasing thumb over the head, then drew her hand down the shaft once, twice. She felt the way his gasp broke into the rhythm of their kiss, felt his whole body tense and his cock harden ever so slightly further; but still it remained stubbornly soft despite her ministrations, and without the prespend that she normally might have expected to smooth the passage of her hand, her movements produced an unpleasant friction. All his muscles remained tense with discomfort, though she could not tell whether the discomfort was physical.

Finally Loki pulled away, and grasped Sif’s wrist to still her hand. “There are other things we might do that do not depend on my… recalcitrant body,” he said in a seductively rough voice, with a mischievous smile; but neither his voice nor his smile entirely hid that discomfort that Sif might almost have called fear—fear, perhaps, of the vulnerability in allowing another to touch him so intimately. She had little time to puzzle out his expression, however, because he suddenly turned them around to slam Sif’s back against the wall in her turn. The sword sheathed across her back clanked awkwardly against the wall, making her laugh; she unhooked the scabbard from her shoulder and hip and let it fall to the floor.

Loki glanced down at the fallen sword, then back up at Sif. “Are you sure it is wise to leave yourself unarmed in the presence of such a dangerous criminal as myself?” he asked tauntingly.

Lightning-quick, Sif shook him off to reach into her boot and pull out a dagger, which she then held to his throat as he chuckled at her. “If you think I am ever unarmed, then you are a fool,” she said amiably.

“You have turned my foolishness to wisdom,” he said playfully, beginning to unbuckle the sides of her breastplate, his chin slightly raised to avoid the blade still barely grazing his neck.

He cast the unfastened breastplate to the floor beside the sword, then trailed his fingers down the front of the blood-red leather dress she wore beneath her armor, smiling at her slight inhale when he grazed her left breast. Following the movement of his fingers downward, he slowly began to bend his knees, and Sif’s hand followed, too, keeping the knife at his throat until he was kneeling in front of her, lifting the panels of her leather skirt and the thin blue shift under it, reaching up to unlace and pull down her skin-tight leather trousers and the smallclothes beneath. At last Sif drew the knife away, though she still held it tightly even as she spread her arms slightly away from her sides to gain purchase on the wall behind her, and leaned her head back against it.

Loki paused to run his fingers through the small tuft of dark wiry hair on her mound. “Hmm,” he said, almost thoughtful.

“What is it?” she said impatiently.

“Nothing, really—I was only recalling that it is fashionable on Xandar for women to remove most if not all of the hair on their lower bodies.”

“Well, Asgardian women don’t,” Sif replied irritably. “Do Xandarian men wish to imagine that they are fucking prepubescent girls?” she asked scornfully.

“Only a cultural difference in aesthetic preference,” Loki said mildly, as he ran a finger down from her mound, brushing lightly over her clit (she hissed in a breath), dragging more slowly down the length of her slit (she exhaled sharply), until he slid the finger inside (her gasp caught in her throat), then a second, and ran them over the front wall of her opening (she let out a long sigh).

He left his fingers there, working steadily in and out, as he leaned forward to touch his tongue to her clit. Sif’s gasp this time was half a cry, and her sigh was half a moan when he began to lick slow circles there; and when the licking started to alternate with gentle sucking, growing gradually stronger, she clenched her mouth shut with a whimper deep in her throat and drew a long shuddering breath through her nose. As strong as the urge was to tilt her head back and close her eyes, to shut out her other senses and surrender herself to the bodily pleasure, she forced herself to watch him; and the pleasure that brought, it seemed, was far greater than any her body could yield.

She had never stopped wanting this, she realized. As much as she had thought she was over her childish infatuation with Loki, she had never stopped wanting this: his quick silver tongue (or quicksilver, perhaps) between her legs; his lithe body, its wiry strength coiled taut like a spring, hers to command; that vast, thirsty, ferociously intelligent mind bent to her pleasure. As if feeling her hungry gaze on him, Loki looked up to meet it; though his mouth was otherwise occupied, his slightly narrowed eyes held a mocking smile. Still breathing hard, Sif met his gaze unabashedly, and reached out a possessive hand to rake through that long raven hair. The corners of Loki’s eyes crinkled as the smile in them grew more mischievous, and he continued to stare up at her as the working of his tongue and lips intensified, and he added a third finger to the two already in her cunt. At last Sif could no longer hold his gaze, and she gave into the temptation to throw her head back and clench her eyes shut as she let out a soft shout.

Still clutching her dagger in her right hand, Sif let the fingers of her left hand play through Loki’s hair, clenching a fist against his scalp to tug none-too-gently at it then combing her fingers through the soft tangles until her hand came to rest at the nape of his neck. It was the gesture of affection she had often seen Thor offer to him, and Loki must have recognized it as such, because the muscles of his neck tensed and he froze for a moment, stilling the movements of his fingers and tongue. But he relaxed when Sif moved her hand up to cradle the too-sharp line of his jaw, then trailed her fingers back down his neck to trace the too-deep hollow above his clavicle. She pushed her hand beneath the collar of his tunic and over the slender curve of his shoulder to rake down his back—and then it was her turn to freeze.

Beneath her fingers she felt thick raised ridges, very much like scars, that had not been there before. She had seen Loki shirtless often enough in their youth when they were sparring on a hot day, or when the six friends went swimming at the shore or in a woodland stream, and the skin of his back had been pale and unmarked; what battle scars he had were on his limbs or on the front of his body (giving the lie to the charge of cowardice commonly whispered out of his hearing).

“Take off your shirt,” Sif commanded abruptly.

Loki pulled his mouth away from its task, though he left his fingers where they were. “What, are we making tender love now? I thought we were having hate-fueled sex against a wall; and for that one can usually remain mostly clothed.” His slight sneer failed to hide the apprehension in his eyes.

“Take off your shirt,” Sif repeated with dangerous calm, lightly tapping the knife held in her right hand against the wall.

Loki pulled his fingers out of her cunt with deliberate slowness, rose, and walked casually to a small table where a silver ewer of water stood, to pick up a linen towel that lay beside it and wipe the white slick off his hand (Sif, meanwhile, took the opportunity to pull up and re-lace her trousers). Then he turned to face her as he took off his leather surcoat, folded it, and draped it over the back of the chair in the middle of the room, then did the same with his tunic. Something tightened in Sif’s chest to see the way all his ribs stood out; but that was not what she had wanted to see.

“Turn around,” she ordered, stepping away from the wall and flexing the fingers curled around the hilt of the knife.

Loki’s eyes were like stone and his jaw tightened, deepening the already cavernous hollows of his cheeks, but he obeyed.

Sif drew in a long hissing breath at what she saw. Scars crisscrossed his back, from shoulders to hips, in long thin white lines and shorter thick ridges of angry-looking puckered pink tissue—a scar pattern distinctive of flogging, or perhaps even, considering the width and apparent depth of some of the cuts, of scourging with a metal-tipped lash.

“What happened to you, in that year you were gone?” Sif breathed.

“What do you think?” he snarled, whirling back around to face her. “I fell into a great gash in the fabric of space, and came back a year later ready to invade Midgard at the head of an alien army. Did you think I spent that year strolling through flowery meadows?”

“I didn’t know…”

“And what do you know now?” He barked a laugh. “That I was whipped for disobedience. One must be a soldier before one can be a general, is it not so? One must learn to obey before one can hope to command.”

“What are you saying?” Sif shook her head, confused, disbelieving. “You were tortured.”

“Call it what you like. What difference does it make? Will you go to Odin and plead with him to overturn my conviction? Lighten my sentence?”

Now it was Sif’s turn to bark out a mirthless laugh. “And what should I tell him about the circumstances under which I saw your naked back?”

Loki’s broad grin, frightening as it was, seemed genuinely amused. “Wouldn’t that be a delightful conversation?” He laughed a little wildly at the thought. “But even if you thought of some explanation—what could possibly excuse my terrible crimes? Or even mitigate them? My will is, and always has been, my own. Why should Odin care what lies in a criminal’s past?”

Overwhelmed, Sif put a hand over her face and shook her head again. “He’s your father, Loki. Why didn’t you tell him what happened to you…?”

Eyes blazing, hands clenched tight in white-knuckled fists, Loki swept out an arm and knocked the silver ewer to the floor with a clatter. “He has made perfectly clear that he is no such thing,” Loki hissed. “If he is my father, why didn’t he ask?”

Sif bit her lip. She could think of nothing to say to that.

“Now, Lady Sif,” Loki said, his voice poisonously sweet, “should I assume that we are finished here? I do not know whether your lust is quenched or enflamed by _pity.”_ He spat the word out as if it was bitter on his tongue.

Sif hardly knew herself, though she knew that her earlier rage had been replaced by something softer. She had hardly thought to look in this mad, bitter stranger (as she had called him) for the boy she had once known and, for a brief time, loved. It was not until she had seen the scars he tried to hide that she saw the shadow of that boy who wore a smiling face for the world and nursed his wounds in secret.

“Why did you learn in your exile how to pleasure a woman, or a man?” she asked softly.

“Only _now_ you think to ask?” he said scathingly.

“Did you—were you forced to—”

“—whore myself out?” he finished with exaggerated cheerfulness. “In a manner of speaking. But do not worry: all of my, ah, _clients_ were very respectable—from the very highest echelons of society in the Nova Empire. You need not fear catching any alien pox.”

Sif closed her eyes and breathed deeply, though whether it was anger or sorrow she was suppressing she could not tell. “And why did you want this now, when you gain no pleasure from it?”

Loki’s falsely cheerful smile grew wider. “Another excellent question, somewhat delayed in the asking—though your supposition is false. Like all living things, I derive pleasure from the feeling of power. And do not dare to act indignant,” he said, holding out a hand to silence her as she opened her mouth to react. “I know full well that much of your own pleasure in this— _transaction—_ was derived from the feeling of power, and not only from the… more obvious source.”

“Then apparently you and I had different ideas about who held the power in this situation,” Sif said coolly, toying with her dagger.

“It is all a matter of perspective,” Loki said with a coy smile. “The master whose slave caters to all his desires thinks that he alone is powerful and self-sufficient. But it is the slave, who learns patiently to delay the fulfillment of his desires, who sees his labor realized in the object, that achieves true self-consciousness.”

Sif was utterly baffled. “What in Yggdrasil’s nine branches are you talking about?”

“Hegel. Another of my Midgardian philosophers. But never mind: as someone-or-other said, the whole history of philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. You already have the text; the footnotes are optional.”

And now Sif could clearly see the curious, bookish boy she had known; but she did not know if the stranger was pulling out his face to wear as a mask, or if it was the boy who wore the mask of the cruel, mocking stranger. Perhaps both faces were masks; perhaps both masks were his face.

Not letting herself stop to think about why she was doing it, Sif sheathed her knife in her boot, then strode forward to take Loki’s face between her hands and kiss him with an almost violent intensity. For a moment, again, she feared that the boy would resurface and he would turn away from her; but for whatever reasons of his own, the stranger stayed, opened his mouth to her again, repaid her violence in kind.

Again, without knowing why, Sif found her hands straying down over Loki’s shoulders to trace the scars on his back, finding a raised line and running a gentle finger along it, finding where it intersected with another and turning to follow the new path. Loki pulled away from her lips, though not from her hands, and looked down at her, his eyes hard with something like anger. “And what is it that now sharpens your desire, my lady? The thought of me defeated and brought low? Or the thought of me as a wounded bird to be nursed?”

“What does it matter?” she asked breathlessly, her eyes flashing back at him.

When he shrugged, she felt the scars ripple ever so slightly over the jutting bone of his shoulder blades. “Both, of course, are manifestations of the will to power; but pity is ‘the will to power of the weakest.’”

“Then perhaps we are both pitiable,” she growled.

Laughing, Loki steered them toward the bed and pushed her down against the headboard. After one last nip to her mouth, he slithered downward first to pull off her boots (fastidious as ever, he did not want mud on his bedding), and then back up to lift her skirts and unlace her trousers again and resume his previous work. Though the fire of her arousal had been banked somewhat by the interruption, it quickly flared up again at his renewed attentions. Heat and tension were building through her abdomen; she found herself bucking against his mouth as her muscles contracted around his fingers. With a muffled chuckle, Loki reached up with his other hand to hold down her hips.

Sif, for her part, never took her hands away from Loki’s back, alternately tracing the lines of his scars and splaying her hands over them to feel the intricate pattern they made. The feel of them made her chest tighten with an unnamable emotion, at once love and lust and pity and rage and awe. They were the sign, the embodiment, of all the untold terrible experiences that had made him a stranger, but they also formed a link to the boy he had been. There was no longer only a yawning abyss between the quietly playful, quietly sorrowful boy who had fallen and the vicious, power-mad monster who had returned: there were these physical traces of the process that had wrought the change in him. Sif clung to those traces, to that link, though she could not have said why. It would be easier to justify this mad, impulsive tryst if she could think of Loki only as an infuriating stranger. But what seemed to light all her veins on fire was the knowledge that he was _both._

At last, with a short, quiet, “Ah!”, Sif felt her release pulse through her lower body in waves of contracting muscle and spreading warmth. Loki kept his mouth latched onto her through it, until at last the feeling became so intense that the pleasant pressure turned painful, and she gave a grunt and a light tap to his face to tell him to get off.

He laughed softly and withdrew his fingers as well as his mouth. Then he got up and opened a barely visible door in the back wall of his cell into a tiny adjoining washroom and turned on the tap in a small basin-like sink. While he washed his hands, splashed water on his face, and rinsed out his mouth, Sif re-laced her trousers, put her boots back on, then stood to retrieve her breastplate and sword from the floor where they had fallen.

Loki emerged from the washroom while she was still fastening on her armor. He took up his tunic from where he had laid it over the back of the chair and pulled it on over his head. Sif felt a little twinge of sorrow, or regret, to know that he would go back to hiding his scars. His father and mother would never see them, would never know; Thor would never know.

The course of the visit had strayed far from its original purpose, but before she left, Sif made another attempt at her intended errand. “Please, Loki: I wish you would show Thor that his brother is still alive. Show him what you have shown me—”

Loki barked out a laugh. Sif, realizing why, growled in frustration. “Oh, for the love of Yggdrasil, Loki! You know what I mean. He should know what you went through, in exile. What made you… do what you did.”

Loki laughed again, much more harshly. “You think a set of flogging scars can explain everything? Or is it just that you think Thor will be so moved by pity that he will forgive all my trespasses? No, Sif; I do not want his pity—or yours.” Loki’s smile was all bitterness and cruelty and cold rage. “But if he wants to come for a hate fuck, too, I may indulge him.”

Sif wanted to slap him; but she had already given in to too many unworthy urges this night. “Have it your way,” she said icily. She hooked her scabbard back onto her armor, then stalked out without a backward glance.

Loki straightened out his rumpled bedding, picked up his book from where it had fallen onto the floor, and stretched himself out on the bed again to resume his reading. Almost immediately after Sif walked out through the great double doors to the dungeons, two Einherjar came in; one took up his post just inside the door, and the other began pacing along the near-empty row of cells. Loki paid them no mind; it would be another hour before the glaring white lights in his cells were turned off, so that he would be forced to stop reading and attempt, with an unquiet mind, to go to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Crimson Peak_ reference, w00t!
> 
> The Hegel reference is to the master/slave dialectic from the Self-consciousness chapter of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ (which is basically the only part of that book I managed to read). The person who said the thing about all of philosophy being footnotes to Plato was Alfred North Whitehead; but because I can't usually remember who said it, I decided that Loki can't remember, either.
> 
> Please leave comments! This is my first ever explicit-rated fic, so feedback on whether I'm doing it right would be useful.


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